Constructing Tate Modern | Tate Constructing Tate Modern An overview of the construction of Tate Modern, the home of Tate’s collection of international modern and contemporary art. People on the Millennium Bridge walking toward Tate Modern © Tate Bankside Power Station By the 1980s, it had become clear that Tate had outgrown its gallery at Millbank. In December 1992 the Tate Trustees announce their intention create a separate gallery for international modern and contemporary art in London. The redundant Bankside Power Station, designed by Sir Giles Gilbert Scott and built in two phases between 1947 and 1963, was chosen as the site for the new gallery. Choosing an architect To find the best architects for the project, Tate organised an international competition which attracted 148 entries. After a two-stage shortlisting process the eventual winners were the Swiss firm Herzog & de Meuron who are widely acknowledged as one of the leading practices among the younger generation in Europe.

They had already designed a number of widely admired buildings including the Goetz Gallery, Munich (1991–2), Ricola Europe Factory Building (1993), the Schüzenmattstrasse apartment building, Basel (1993) and the Railway Engine Depot and Signal Box Auf dem Wolf, Basel (1992–5). Constructing the new gallery The transformation of the Power Station began in 1995 with the removal of the machinery and a number of out buildings. The building was left as a brick shell supported by a steel skeleton. The Construction Management method was used to construct the new gallery. The building work was split into distinct packages, each carried out by a specialist contractor. The Construction Manager, Schal (a division of Carillion plc) was responsible for the whole construction programme. Construction work began on the site during October 1997 when the concrete foundation was laid. At this point, a time capsule containing plans, photographs and videos relating to the project, as well as drawings by local schoolchildren, was buried in the foundations. A steel framework was built within the existing walls of the Power Station to create the seven gallery floors.

This framework also supports the existing brick façade of the building. By autumn 1998, the building was watertight and a detailed fit-out of the space began and by August the following year, the galleries had been fitted out with environmental controls, permanent lighting had been installed across the building and the stairs and escalator had been put in place. In January 2000, the site was officially handed over to Tate from construction managers, Schal and the installation of the displays began. Tate Modern opened to the public on 12 May 2000. Funding the new gallery In total, the conversion of the Bankside Power Station into an art gallery cost £134 million. The Millennium Commission gave the project £50 million, English Partnerships provided £12 million for the purchase of the site, and Arts Council England gave £6.2 million towards the conversion of Level 4 into temporary exhibition space. Further investment was given by Southwark Council alongside donations from other private, public and charitable organisations.

The Founding Corporate Partners Scheme was launched in 1998, a scheme where Partners make a commitment lasting up to five years and in return for their investment, gain exclusive benefits including entertaining, employee education events, private views and special access behind the scenes. Part of the money raised from this scheme contributed to the building works at Tate Modern. Funded by Millennium Commission, Arts Council of England, English Partnerships (London), and Southwark Council. History of Tate | Tate History of Tate Freedom of information When Tate first opened its doors to the public in 1897 it had just one site, displaying a small collection of British artworks. Today Tate has four major sites and the national collection of British art from 1500 to the present day and international modern and contemporary art, which includes nearly 70,000 artworks. A number of new developments are planned for Tate Modern , Tate Britain and Tate St Ives to ensure the galleries continue to expand. A family of galleries Henry Tate In 1889 Henry Tate, an industrialist who had made his fortune as a sugar refiner, offered his collection of British art to the nation.

There was no space for it in the National Gallery and the creation of a new gallery dedicated to British art was seen as a worthwhile aim and the search for a suitable site began. This gallery would house not only Henry Tate’s gift but also the works of British artists from various other collections. Sir John Everett Millais, Bt Ophelia 1851-2 View the main page for this artwork The gallery at Millbank, London In 1892 the site of a former prison, the Millbank Penitentiary, was chosen for the new National Gallery of British Art, which would be under the Directorship of the National Gallery at Trafalgar Square. The prison, used as the departure point for sending convicts to Australia, had been demolished in 1890. Sidney R.J. Smith was chosen as the architect for the new gallery. His design is the core building that we see today, a grand porticoed entranceway and central dome which resembles a temple. The statue of Britannia with a lion and a unicorn on top of the pediment at the Millbank entrance emphasised its function as a gallery of British art.

The gallery opened its doors to the public in 1897, displaying 245 works in eight rooms from British artists dating back to 1790. Growth of the gallery Since its original opening, the Millbank site has had seven major building extensions. In its first 15 years the Millbank site more than doubled in size, including the addition of seven rooms designed by the architect W.H. Romaine-Walker and funded by the arts and antique dealer J.J.(Sir Joseph) Duveen, built to display the Turner Bequest . By 1917, the remit of the gallery changed. It was made responsible for the national collection of British art from 1500 to the present day and international modern and contemporary art Romaine-Walker was again commissioned to design the new Modern Foreign Galleries, which were funded by Joseph Duveen’s son, Lord Duveen. These opened in 1926 and a year later a series of murals by Rex Whistler were unveiled in the restaurant. Tate Gallery In 1932, the gallery officially adopted the name Tate Gallery, by which it had popularly been known as since its opening.

In 1937, the new Duveen Sculpture Galleries opened. Funded by Lord Duveen and designed by John Russell Pope, Romaine-Walker and Gilbert Jenkins, these two 300 feet long barrel-vaulted galleries were the first public galleries in England designed specifically for the display of sculpture. By this point, electric lighting had also been installed in all the rooms enabling the gallery to stay open until 5pm whatever the weather. In 1955, Tate Gallery became wholly independent from the National Gallery and discussions began on an extension that would increase the its exhibition space. A major extension in the north-east corner, designed by Richard Llewelyn-Davies opened in 1979. In the same year, the gallery took over the adjacent disused military hospital, enabling the building of the new Clore Gallery, designed by Sir James Stirling and funded by the Clore Foundation . It opened in 1987 and went on to win a Royal Institute of British Architects award the following year.

The Tate Liverpool gallery building, on the Albert Dock Tate Liverpool In the 1980s Alan Bowness , then director of Tate, decided to create a ‘Tate of the North’, as the project became known. This would be a gallery with a distinct identity, dedicated to showing modern art and encouraging a new, younger audience through an active education programme. A warehouse at the disused Albert Dock in Liverpool was chosen as the site for the new gallery. The dock, once a bustling site crammed with rich cargos from Asia, tea, silk, tobacco and spirits, was derelict. In 1981 the dockyard underwent a rejuvenation, with the Maritime Museum leasing one of the warehouses and restaurants and bars opening. In 1985, James Stirling was commissioned to design the new Tate Gallery at Liverpool. His designs left the exterior of the brick and stone building built over a colonnade of sturdy Doric columns almost untouched, but transformed the interior into an arrangement of simple, elegant galleries suitable for the display of modern art. It opened to the public in May 1988. 2008 marked the year Liverpool was named European Capital of Culture.

To celebrate this, in 2007 the gallery hosted the Turner Prize , the first time the competition was held outside London. more than 600,000 visitors a year visit Tate Liverpool , cementing its position as a venue for major European exhibitions of modern art. Tate St Ives St Ives, a small Cornish town on the southwest coast of England, perhaps seems an unlikely site for a major art gallery. However, its artistic connections date back to Victorian times when numerous artists came to St Ives to paint, attracted by its special quality of light. Artists associated with the town include Barbara Hepworth , Naum Gabo , Alfred Wallis and Mark Rothko . Tate had formed a close link with St Ives when it took over the management of the Barbara Hepworth Museum and Sculpture Garden in 1980. By the middle of the decade it was decided a gallery should be built there to show works by artists who had lived or worked in St Ives, loaned from the collection . In 1988, a building was chosen on the site of a former gasworks overlooking Porthmeor Beach and the Atlantic Ocean.

The architects Eldred Evans and David Shalev were selected for designs that echoed the shapes of the former gasworks, including the rotunda that forms the heart of the gallery. Building work began in 1991, funded by donations from the local community, the Henry Moore Foundation and the European Regional Development Fund. The Tate Gallery, St Ives opened in June 1993 and in just six months welcomed over 120,000 visitors – 50,000 more than the original target for the entire year. Since then, the gallery has been an outstanding success with an average of 240,000 visitors per year. An exciting development is now planned for Tate St Ives , which will provide better exhibition and display spaces, new education areas and improved visitor facilities, allowing greater scope for understanding the heritage of the St Ives artists’ colony. Tate Modern In December 1992 the Tate Trustees announced their intention to create a separate gallery for international modern and contemporary art in London. The former Bankside Power Station was selected as the new gallery site in 1994.

The following year, Swiss architects Herzog & De Meuron were appointed to convert the building into a gallery. That their proposal retained much of the original character of the building was a key factor in this decision. The iconic power station, built in two phases between 1947 and 1963, was designed by Sir Giles Gilbert Scott. It consisted of a stunning turbine hall, 35 metres high and 152 metres long, with the boiler house alongside it and a single central chimney. However, apart from a remaining operational London Electricity sub-station the site had been redundant since 1981. In 1996 the design plans were unveiled and, following a £12 million grant from the English Partnerships regeneration agency, the site was purchased and work began. The huge machinery was removed and the building was stripped back to its original steel structure and brickwork. The turbine hall became a dramatic entrance and display area and the boiler house became the galleries. Since it opened in May 2000, more than 40 million people have visited Tate Modern . It is one of the UK’s top three tourist attractions and generates an estimated £100 million in economic benefits to London annually.

In 2009 Tate embarked on a major project to develop Tate Modern. Working again with Herzog & de Meuron, the transformed Tate Modern will make use of the power station’s spectacular redundant oil tanks, increase gallery space and provide much improved visitor facilities. Tate Modern lit up at night, 2000 A family of galleries With the creation of the new gallery at Bankside, the gallery at Millbank was able to return to its original function as the national gallery of British art. In preparation for this, a major Centenary Development project was completed, providing the site with ten new galleries, five refurbished galleries and a dramatic new entrance on Atterbury Street. In 2000, the four galleries were re-branded with the opening of the new gallery at Bankside: Tate Britain, Tate Modern, Tate Liverpool and Tate St Ives. A number of building projects are now underway to further develop and expand the galleries. Tate Modern London Art Galleries, Art History & Styles of Art - Art.com Wiki Top Picture: Tate Modern London, 2001 ( source ; attribution: Hans Peter Schaefer, ) The Tate Modern is a spectacular gallery in London that houses international contemporary and modern art.

The gallery building is a redesigned power station with many original features integrated into the new design. Art Galleries Industrialist Henry Tate donated his British art collection to the British nation in 1889. It was apparent the National Gallery couldn’t hold the entire collection, so a new gallery was built to be dedicated to British art, including the Tate collection. A former prison called the Millbank Penitentiary was the site chosen for the new gallery, which was designed by Sidney R. J. Smith, and it was under the directorship of the National Gallery at Trafalgar Square. The central dome and grand entrance are part of Smith’s original design. The National Gallery of British Art opened to the public in 1897. Its eight rooms showcased 245 British works dating from 1790. Within fifteen years, the gallery’s size more than doubled. Seven extensions have been added to the original building, with seven of the rooms being designed by architect W.H. Romaine-Walker. The national collection of British art dating from 1500 and the international contemporary and modern art was moved to the gallery by 1917.

Romaine-Walker was hired a second time to build the Modern Foreign Galleries, which opened in 1926. Arts and antique dealer J.J. Duveen and his son, Lord Duveen, were responsible for funding the gallery’s growth, and in 1937, the new Duveen Sculpture Galleries were opened. These galleries were designed by Romaine-Walker and Gilbert Jenkins to display sculpted works. By this time, electric lighting had been installed. The museum had officially become known as the Tate Gallery , and in 1955, it became independent from the National Gallery of British Art. In 1979, another extension was added to the gallery, and the new Clore Gallery, designed by Sir James Stirling, was also added. The Clore Gallery won a Royal Institute of British Architects award following its 1987 opening. Director Alan Bowness took on the project of building the Tate Liverpool, which was to house modern art for a new generation, in 1980. Stirling was again commissioned for the Tate Gallery Liverpool in 1985, and the gallery opened three years later.

Liverpool officially became the European Capital of Culture in 2008, and the Tate Liverpool began hosting the Turner Prize, bringing more than 600,000 visitors to the gallery each year. St. Ives, a Cornish coastal town in England, had been a popular setting for artists since Victorian times. Architects Eldred Evans and David Shalev were commissioned to build a new Tate Gallery in St. Ives to feature the work of artists who had lived or visited the town, and the Tate Gallery, St. Ives opened its doors in 1993. The Tate Trustees elected to build a separate Tate Gallery for international contemporary and modern art in London in 1992. They chose the Bankside Power station as the new site in 1994. Swiss architects Herzog & De Meuron were commissioned to redesign the power station into the new Tate Modern London. The original building’s design by Sir Giles Gilbert Scott was integrated into the new design. With a grant from the English Partnerships regeneration agency, work began on the Tate Modern London in 1996. The grand entrance and display room of the Tate Modern are conversions of the turbine hall of the power station.

The Tate Modern opened in May of 2000 and is one of the top three UK tourist attractions. Contents From Power Station to Temple of Modern Art | Visit Bankside Sign up for the Visit Bankside newsletter From Power Station to Temple of Modern Art In the late 80s Tate realized that its collection had outgrown its home on Millbank and decided to create a new gallery to house Tate's international modern art. The redundant Bankside Power Station, closed in 1981 due to increased oil prices, proved an astonishing discovery; a building of enormous size, great architectural distinction, superbly sited opposite St Paul's Cathedral and in a fascinating and historic, if neglected area, next to the rebuilt Globe Theatre, where a thriving community of artists lived and worked. An international architectural competition was held, which over seventy architects entered, including some of the world's most distinguished. The final choice was the young Swiss practice, Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron, whose designs were in sympathy with the building's previous use. The Tate Gallery was at pains to work with the local community during the building work including local residents throughout the process and thereafter, setting up the Bankside Artists Training Trust to support young artists working locally.

Furthermore, the final designs were made in conjunction with Tate staff and Trustees, led and held together by Sir Nicholas Serota, director of the Tate Gallery. The Tate Modern opened in 2000 - there were close to 5 million visitors in the first year of opening and in only one year, Tate Modern had become the third most visited tourist attraction in Britain and the anchor attraction on the south side of the Thames, drawing attention and people to a previously undiscovered and undeveloped area. Since then visitor numbers have continued rise due in part to international travel and the tourism overload suffered by the West End and the City and in part to the increasing number of attractions in the area including a replica of the Golden Hinde ship, the Clink Prison Museum and the sleek Vinopolis wine-tasting attraction. Since then hotels and restaurants have opened to serve them and in recent years the growing popularity of Borough Market has firmly placed Bankside on the tourist map. Tate Modern, London Tate Modern Tate Modern has an excellent collection of modern art, from 1900 until now. It is housed in a former power station. Since its opening in 2000 it has become one of Londen's most popular museums.

The Building The galleries of Tate Modern are housed in an enormous brick building that was once the home of the Bankside Power Station. Designed by Sir Giles Gilbert Scott, it was built between 1947 and 1963. Its striking tower is ninety-nine meters tall; regulations stipulated that it was not allowed to be taller than the dome of the St. Paul's Cathedral just across the river Thames. A New Museum At the end of the 1990s the Tate Gallery - now known as Tate Britain - was struggling with a lack of space due to its quickly expanding collection of modern art. So it was decided to split up the collection and search for a new location to house the modern works of art. The power station, which was located at the riverbank of the Tate Modern Thames was chosen as it had been abandoned in 1981 and offered plenty of space. A competition was held to find an architect for the reconversion of the building. A plan by the Swiss architects Herzog and de Meuron was selected out of 148 entries. The museum opened at this location in May 2000 and has become quite a popular tourist attraction thanks to its eclectic collection of modern art.

Also, entrance to many of the collections and exhibits at Tate Modern is free, which adds to its popularity. The Galleries Visitors heading to Tate Modern are treated to a real plethora of modern art. On the first floor, Turbine Hall, guests will find specially commissioned works that change from year to year. On the next level, a small exhibition space profiles changing works of contemporary artists, both regional and international. Summertime, Jackson Pollock On level 3, galleries include Abstraction, Expressionism, and Abstract Expressionism, and guests will view masterpieces by such artists as Matisse, Monet, and Kapoor, just to name a few. Level 4 houses temporary exhibits while level 5 zeroes in on such movements as Cubism, Futurism, Pop Art, Minimalism, Constructivism, and Conceptual Art. Artists displayed here might include Andy Warhol, Pablo Picasso, and Roy Lichtenstein. Outside, you can hop aboard the Tate Boat and make the twenty minute trip to Tate Modern's sister museum, Tate Britain, which has the world's largest collection of British art.

The Switch House Herzog & de Meuron Switch House In 2016 Tate Modern significantly expanded its exhibition area with the addition of two large oil tanks and a new, very modern-looking glass pyramid extension (the so-called Switch House) which houses photography, video, and community exhibits. The architects for the extension, which was added to the south side of the existing building, are Herzog and de Meuron. Duration: 3 hours 30 minutes Book this tour London Attractions: Tate Modern Art Gallery, England/UK Tourist Attractions - YouTube London Attractions: Tate Modern Art Gallery, England/UK Tourist Attractions Want to watch this again later? Sign in to add this video to a playlist. Need to report the video? Sign in to report inappropriate content. Rating is available when the video has been rented. This feature is not available right now. Please try again later. Published on Jan 22, 2015 London Attractions: Tate Modern Art Gallery, England/UK Tourist Attractions. Traveling: A visit to London isn't complete without a trip to Tate Modern. The collection at Tate Modern includes all the major modern art movements from Fauvism onwards.

It features Picasso and Matisse, Dali, Ernst and Mirò. There are works by Pollock, Naum Gabo and Giacometti and the Seagram Murals of Rothko are displayed in the famous Tate Rothko Room. Pop art has its place, including works of Lichtenstein and Warhol, as does Minimal art and Conceptual art. Britain's national museum of modern and contemporary art from around the world is housed in the former Bankside Power Station on the banks of the Thames. The awe-inspiring Turbine Hall runs the length of the entire building and you can see amazing work for free by artists such as Cézanne, Bonnard, Matisse, Picasso, Rothko, Dalí, Pollock, Warhol and Bourgeois. Tate Modern London is the national gallery of international modern art for Britain. Based in a spectacular disused power station in the heart of London, Tate Modern was created in 2000 and has since become world renowned as a centre for modern art from around the world. For contemporary art lovers the Tate Modern is must on your visit to London.

Also, this modern art gallery can found on London’s Southbank, a stones throw from the Thames and the infamous millennium footbridge, an intriguing piece of modern engineering.

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| artnet News Does Britain Need a New Tate Modern? February 25, 2014 Tate Modern building project. View of construction site. (Photo: Tate Photography.) Frequent visitors to Tate Modern are already used to the noise of the building site outside. The museum’s £215m extension is due for completion in 2016, but construction is well underway, and a pyramid is rising from the ground to the sound of cranes and pneumatic drills. Even at this early stage, the structure is impressive, announcing Tate Modern’s firm intention to remain the global reference when it comes to modern and contemporary art galleries. The most visited museum in the world in its category, it became the fourth most popular museum worldwide almost immediately after its inauguration in 2000, and is the UK’s second tourist attraction. Audience-wise, Paris’ Centre Pompidou and New York’s MoMA don’t even come close. “When Tate Modern opened we expected two million visitors,” director Chris Dercon told artnet News via email. “In the first year we had five million visitors.

Tate Modern is growing to meet that demand.” It seems logical enough, yet as museums mushroom and funds dry up, one has to ask: is growth the only way forward? What is the potential impact locally, nationally, and on the museum itself? Swiss architects Herzog & de Meuron, the brains behind the initial transformation of Bankside’s old power station, have been called in again to design the new building. It will sit atop the former station’s oil tanks, which will be dedicated to installations, performance and time-based media and act as the foundations for a network of exhibition spaces of various sizes. “In terms of topography, it’s almost like a little city,” explains Jacques Herzog in a video published on the Tate website. Connected to the original building, the new structure will add 5,600 square meters of exhibition space and allow for the display of 60 percent more artworks from the collection. Also planned are education facilities, offices, catering and retail spaces, a public terrace and a new Members Room—bringing the total added floor space to just under 21,000 square meters.

Herzog describes Tate’s pyramid as “something between a really rational form and a really irrational form.” Like at the Louvre, the choice of this particular shape—imbued with notions of power and permanence—is highly symbolic. Initially the idea was to have a stack of glass boxes. But the plan was abandoned, perhaps judged too banal, or too at odds with the original structure. “All building schemes go through phases of refinement,” Dercon told artnet News, although he wouldn’t elaborate further (Herzog & de Meuron’s partner in charge of the project, Ascan Mergenthaler, declined to comment on the change). While the final design will radically transform Tate Modern’s silhouette, it is much more sympathetic to its surroundings. The bare concrete skeleton now soaring next to the old power station will be clad in a brick lattice redolent of London’s Victorian vernacular architecture, and the building’s height will echo the museum’s famous chimney. Yet not everyone is thrilled.

Although sympathetic to the museum’s motives, James Hatts, the editor of the local community website London SE1, told artnet News he was “sad to lose the shape and outline of the old Bankside Power Station building.” Tate Modern’s new spaces will reflect and accommodate changes in art practice as well as accommodating more visitors. The boom in installation and performance art of the last decade has had an impact on the museum’s collection, which now features more than 300 large-scale installations, compared to just 86 in 2000, when Tate Modern first opened. These need appropriate galleries in which to be shown. Yet what is at stake with this extension is more than just the addition of space or exhibition possibilities. “The Tate aspiration,” says Mergenthaler, “is to rethink the Tate, and reach out with a new model for museums of modern and contemporary art.” But this quest for a new model here means following the museum-as-architectural-landmark trend that has become ubiquitous in the wake of Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Museum Bilbao.

Marketing material describes Tate Modern extension as “the capital’s first great public building of the 21st century,” an “iconic world-class addition to the London skyline.” And it is very much inscribed in the rapid regeneration of the Bermondsey area, epitomized by the inauguration of the Qatar National Bank-funded Shard building in 2012. Tate Modern itself has been a key player in this local transformation. Since its opening, the number of residents in the immediate neighborhood has doubled from 3,000 to 6,000, and the number of people working locally has jumped from 6,000 to 60,000. In his contribution to the 2011 Culture and Urban Transformation international seminar at SESC Belenzinho in São Paulo, Tate’s director of Regeneration & Community Donald Hyslop estimates that the economic impact Tate has generated is “worth hundreds of millions of pounds to the economy of London.” The museum has also been proactive in forging links with its environment via several initiatives, including the Tate Community Garden and the Community Film Club.

London SE1’s editor Hatts describes the museum as a “good neighbor,” but he worries that, with the new extension, “‘normal people will be priced out—including artists and creatives.” In Bermondsey, as anywhere else, gentrification comes at a price. According to home.co.uk , the median property selling price in the borough of Southwark increased 163 percent between 2000 and 2013—against 94 percent for London as a whole. The future might well confirm Hatts’s fears as the arrival of the new building—combined with the capital’s current real estate frenzy—is unlikely to reverse the trend. With growth comes ever-increasing funding needs. So far, Tate has been successful in attracting major gifts. Last July the organization announced it had secured £10m for the Tate Modern project from the Eyal Ofer Family Foundation, set up by an Israeli real estate and shipping magnate who is worth an estimated $6 billion. The donation has brought the total of funding raised for the extension to 85 percent of the total £215m. This is no small feat.

In the UK the culture of philanthropy is modest in comparison to that of the US—and the country is yet to have a tax regime to fully encourage it (despite politicians’ fantasies that private wealth will come to the rescue of dwindling public funds). But finding money has always been the forte of Tate director Sir Nicholas Serota, who pioneered the fundraising auction model in London as early as 1987, while director of the Whitechapel Gallery. Today only 40 percent of Tate’s total income (£157.8m in 2012–13) comes via the Department for Culture, Media and Sport’s Grant in Aid. The remaining 60 percent is self-generated and includes admissions, Tate Enterprises revenue, sponsorship, and donations (the exact proportions for the last two are not publically released); and these figures encompass Tate Modern, Tate Britain, Tate Liverpool and Tate St Ives since, when contacted by artnet News, the organization refused to disclose the breakdown of income and expenditure per gallery. The museum also turned down an inquiry about the projected operational budget of the new building, as well as about the number of employees who will staff the new building.

The Environmental Statement: Non Technical Summary—part of the planning application submitted in January 2009—estimates the total net employment for the development as 306. The secrecy shrouding all things new Tate makes guessing even a ballpark operational budget virtually impossible, but it is likely to be significant— and Tate has no doubt prepared for it. The question is how? “It’s pretty unlikely that Tate has gone into this with some sort of big gap in their budget,” says Museums Association director Mark Taylor. Yet, as he points out, fundraising can’t be the only solution. “I suspect they are going to have problems raising significant funds for keeping it open,” he adds. “People don’t want to give you money to pay for the lights, the drains, and the toilets. They want shiny new buildings.” Could the extension mean more reliance on corporate sponsorship – including Tate’s highly controversial partnership with oil giant BP? More retail units embedded within the fabric of the museum? More blockbuster shows to attract paying crowds? In short, is there a risk that financial pressures will have too great an impact upon Tate’s artistic and strategic decisions in the future?

These questions are worth bearing in mind, as some of our best museums seem to get caught in the capitalist grow-or-die model. Bigger museums attract more visitors, lured by their collections, their programs, and their newfound must-see status on the tourist’s checklist. In the likely scenario that the Tate extension ends up welcoming more punters than it was built for, should a third building rise up beside the pyramid? One can only be thrilled by the popularity contemporary art has come to enjoy in the last decade, yet this seemingly insatiable appetite could be used to foster diversity rather that boost the profile of behemoth institutions that increasingly function like global brands. “Diversification and specialization in the presentation of kinds of contemporary work is also pertinent to galleries and museums,” says Alessandro Vincentelli, a curator at BALTIC, which is one of the many smaller British institutions that have shined in recent years. There are more than 240 museums in London alone, and upwards of 2,400 throughout the UK.

Although Tate has championed art in the regions, with two branches outside the capital and a touring program of Artist Room exhibitions, it remains “a long established reality that the distribution of culture [in the UK] is London-centric,” says Ben Borthwick, former CEO of the Cardiff-based Artes Mundi Prize. A London icon in the making, Tate’s pyramid might place extra emphasis on the capital, and could risk becoming a monument to the London v. Rest of the Country divide. One cannot doubt the future of Tate is bright, nor that a warm reception will greet the new landmark—and rightly so. Let’s just hope it will not completely overshadow the many other initiatives the country has to offer, in London and beyond. Follow artnet News on Facebook. Share Tate Modern in London, England | Expedia Tate Modern in London, England | Expedia Tate Modern Tate Modern, current page Previous image, 7 total items. Next image, 7 total items. Tate Modern An abandoned power station on the banks of the Thames is the ideal home for Britain’s national gallery of modern art. The Tate Modern presents the established giants of modern art as well as the new vanguard.

It occupies the abandoned Bankside Power Station, which was stylishly redesigned in 2000 by Swiss architects Herzog and de Meuron. Walk through the Tate Modern’s entrance into the spacious Turbine Hall, which runs the building’s entire length. Now gutted of machinery, the space houses grand-scale temporary exhibits, which often shock and awe. Past the power station’s boiling chambers, the permanent collection has priceless pieces by Matisse, Dali, Picasso and other giants from impressionism to surrealism. Explore the building’s four wings housing works of the 20th century up to today. The wings are organized according to theme rather than period. In 2012, Tate Modern completed a glass tower dedicated to photography, video and graphical art. Be sure to check the ever-changing program for The Tanks on 0 level. These cavernous former oil storage tanks are extraordinary spaces in themselves and now showcase performance art and events. Visited by four million people each year, the Tate Modern is one of the most popular modern art galleries in the world. Its growing prominence and sometimes controversial exhibits are popular with all ages, even those not interested in traditional art.

While modern art can sometimes be challenging to fully understand, the Tate Modern endeavors to make its collections and exhibits accessible. Join one of the 45-minute guided tours for an even deeper appreciation of the collection. And don’t forget to write down the numbers of pieces you particularly love, as postcards and prints are available from one of the three gallery shops. Take a break from the exhibits and head to the riverside café or the restaurant on level 6, which has terrific views of London. Should you feel inspired to see even more art, jump aboard the Tate to Tate boat for the upriver cruise to the Tate Modern’s sister gallery, Tate Britain. Tate Modern is located in the center of London, near many other attractions. It’s open daily. Admission is free except for special exhibitions. The Southwark tube station is a short walk away. Explore More of London

Question: Which power station building was adapted to become the Tate Modern Art Gallery?
Answer: BANKSIDE